Share This article

Good news, safety fans. Bad news, libertarians. Sooner or later you could be tested for sobriety by your car every time you get in the car. Takata says it’s working with TruTouch Technologies to create a blood alcohol content (BAC) reader the size of your finger (seriously) that should be 96% accurate; better than police test gear. Which begs the question why cops make you blow in a balloon if this is so much better. A safety group estimates that the system will cost at $200, or just under 1% of the $25,000 cost of the typical new car. Safety groups say 8,000-9,000 lives could be saved each year, eventually.

TruTouch says its technology measures BAC through near-infrared light. It’s envisioned as a small fingerpad, like the biometric sensors on some laptops. Place your ungloved finger against the pad and the IR beam senses the BAC. If you’ve heard someone say, “He was so drunk, you could smell the alcohol coming out of his pores,” TruTouch has taken advantage of that. If you’re sober, the car starts. If not, it doesn’t. Right now a handful of cars are equipped with BAC blow tubes and interlocks; they’re for convicted drunk drivers who must use them as a condition of probation. They’re intrusive and they wouldn’t go over well in a Zip Car fleet. Shared car, yes; shared blow tube, no way.

Takata just received a $2.25 million grant from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to move forward with the device. Takata, a supplier of automotive safety components such as airbags and seat belts, will work to embed the TruTouch technology. It would take current technology, described as being the size of a breadbox (pictured right) down to a postage-stamp-size pad and a circuit board, and drop response time from several seconds to 200 milliseconds, one-fifth of a second. Susan Ferguson of the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADSS) organization said the Takata-TruTouch immobilizer/interlock could be on the market in 8-10 years.

If, if, and if: If it does work, and if it’s ordered installed by the government, and if it it’s hard to circumvent, the US might save as many as 9,000 lives a year. Or 8,000. That’s the estimate of a site called DADSS (Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety) sponsored by the Automotive Coalition for Highway Safety and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Their home page says either 8,000 or 9,000 lives (take your pick of the text or the callout) could be saved. They don’t say it, but they’re referring to 20 to 30 years down the road: The device is a decade away (say 2021) and scrappage (the typical life of a car before being junked) is 11 years, so that’s 2032 until many not all pre-2021 models are junked, and around 2040 when they’re essentially gone. In other words: big life savings are a generation away. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that hardcore drinkers, the ones who keep on drinking and driving until they’re caught and imprisoned, will hunt around for cars without the interlocks.

Will it be mandatory? At this point, NHTSA says no, and there goes your possible 8,000-9,000 saved lives. NHTSA’s statement: “[TruTouch] is seen as a potential tool for keeping drunk drivers from being able to operate their car if their blood-alcohol concentration is at or above the legal intoxication limit (.08 or higher). The technology could be voluntarily installed as an option for new cars and signal a new frontier in the fight against drunk driving.” TruTouch also makes industrial BAC analyzers with the finger-scanning technologies and sees the in-car fingerprint reader could also be used on fork-lift trucks, trains, and perhaps factory machinery that injure the unattentive worker.

Even without safety interlocks, drunken driving fatalities are way down, from about 60% of the 50,000 annual fatalities a generation ago to about 32% in recent years, or about 10,500 of the 32,788 motor vehicle crashes in 2010, according to Department of Transportation 2010 Traffic Safety Facts report. Much of the decline comes from tougher enforcement and the fear of getting caught, and safer vehicles are also responsible. Airbags already save a lot of drunks who didn’t buckle up.

Read more at DADSS, or check out the demo video from Takata below (excuse the overbearing, upbeat corporate theme music):

Tagged In

Post a Comment

Question: If you clean it with an alcohol wipe to clean it or use germ-x before putting your finger on it, will it start?

Anonymous

Yes, because the thing works by measuring the amount of alcohol in your blood, so will only work with a human being:)

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IJKMMKNE36KZMHHKK7RUJ4JUAU JoeFlash

The title makes the author sound like an idiot, “breathalyzer that scans your finger”. A breathalyzer is an analyzer that measures the contents of breath. This is an optical analyzer.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_KYPCTVJG4OFNSCRMDPLPSKK3DY Marc

There is an extremely small part of the native-born US population that still drives drunk so why should a device like this be employed on everybody just to slow down the few scofflaws? The MADD coalition refuses to realize that it can’t stop every horrible alcohol related accident from occurring and should back off and take pride in their legislative and cultural awareness successes. The laws on the books are more than sufficient to keep people from boozing and cruising.

http://twitter.com/overlandpark4me overlandpark4me

Congrats, you get the award for the “moron post of the day”.

http://twitter.com/overlandpark4me overlandpark4me

Congrats, you get the award for the “moron post of the day”.

Donald Strader

If this proves reliable, I would rather know before I start driving whether I or other drivers might be too inebriated to drive. Further, if they make these tough to defeat and add a fingerprint reader, every car could have a touch start system, without even the need for a smart or proximity key. Try finding those currently on lower trim level cars. Once you have touch start, you do not want to go back. If it managed to reduce car accidents and thefts overall, it would pay for itself.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.